Eliezer: I'm not saying it's perfect informers, but plenty (not all, but plenty (of that which I've seen, at least)) of the writings include a more informal and playful "feel" to them.

Really, near as I can make out, it relates to the historical facts with regards to public crypto research having an almost "naughty" feel to it, specifically with gov'ts trying to originally discourage that sort of work, etc. But for whatever the reason, the net effect is, well, as I said, the standard "cast of characters" for one thing.

Some other examples may be, say, an annonymous communication protocal that is presented in a paper called "The Dining Cryptographers", and a later version that is meant to be resistant to interference/noise/troublemakers called "The Dining Cryptographers in the Disco"

And the implementations of these protocols are actually referred to as DC nets, which can either mean, well, the title, or be a reference to the author, David Chaum.

Oh, I just remembered something. Now this I have rather less familiarity with, but I seem to recall hearing or seeing mentioned somewhere that graph theory writings tend to have a different feel, that graph theory proofs tend to feel more like "stories being told" as opposed to formal proofs. But this is just something I've heard, and so I don't really know how true that is.